Browsing Topic Best Rereading Quotes

I write quickly with a sense of urgency. I don’t edit myself out of existence, meaning I’ll try to write 50 or 60 pages before I start rereading, revising and editing. That just helps with my confidence.

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author’s sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth’s high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth’s life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic.

We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ‘ Wolf Hall ‘ from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.

There’s a paradox in rereading. You read the first time for rediscovery: an encounter with the confirming emotions. But you reread for discovery: you go to the known to figure out the workings of the unknown, the why of the familiar how.

What a person loves at 20 may seem stupid at 35. That doesn’t mean the book was stupid, it means that the time when it spoke to the reader is past. So . . . I’m cautious about rereading favorite books. I hate to spoil the good feelings they created. Keeping the good feelings is more important than rereading the book. Moving on is a good thing.

Someone once said that middle age is like rereading a book that you haven’t read since you were a callow youth. The first time around you were dazzled by impressions, emotions, and tended to miss the finer points. In middle age you have the equipment to see the subtleties you missed before and you savor it more slowly.

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime’s rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

Rereading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.

My husband was getting his sea legs-rereading Joseph Conrad with a side order of C S Forester.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

I have never started a novel – I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel – I’ve never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

I’m always nervous about going home, just as I am nervous about rereading books that have meant a lot to me.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.

Though my short stories are the more readable, my novels do have more to say; and they will, if anyone has the patience for it, repay a rereading.

There were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who savored the same book repeatedly. Now she understood those rereaders differently … she realized it was not the rereading that led to fresh insights. It was the rereader– because when a person is changing inside, there are inevitably new things to see.

Thou shalt not let a day pass without rereading something great.

Usually when I put together a book like this Death-Ray hardcover or that Ghost World special edition, then I have to reread it and see if there is anything I want to change or any re-coloring I want to do. That’s when I’m faced with the actual work. When I’m working, I’m too close to it. I’m sort of inside, and I can’t see it at all. So when I have that experience of rereading it years later, it’s jarring.

The last book I read was the book I’ve been rereading most of my life, The Fountainhead.

I’m used to rereading e-mails, even, before sending them – a bit compulsive. So this is high speed roller coaster for me!

Rereading a favorite novel first read 5, 10, or 20 years ago, is a measure of our travel, how far we’ve come; it’s a way of visiting an earlier self.

Reading books is good,
Rereading good books is better.